My Reality

by Melissa Rycroft

  I walked right up to Tye. I felt confident, and good, and very strong.

  “Hi there,” I said.

  We caught up a little bit, just small talk, and that was it. In my mind, I had gotten to this new place where I thought we could really just be friends. It was a relief, actually, to look at him as a friend instead of thinking, Please, please, ask me out tomorrow night. Let’s go to a movie. I’ll do anything for us to be together.

  I was continuing to withhold all information about anything that had happened on the show. Not only because I was contractually obligated to keep quiet, but because I didn’t feel like I owed him anything.

  At one point in the night, I walked outside to talk to Jason on the phone, and Jen came out with me. Weirdly, Tye followed us out of the bar onto the sidewalk. I couldn’t figure out what he was doing. I wanted to keep talking to Jason without Tye overhearing me, so I basically started running down the street away from him to have some privacy.

  And then, good friend that she is, Jen got in between Tye and me.

  “Stay here,” she ordered him. “Stay here.”

  Apparently that’s not all she said, either. Jen lit into Tye, letting him know just how badly he had treated me, and how low her opinion of him was because of it.

  Gotta love great friends!

  When I finally said good night to Jason and went back into the bar, Jen and I sat down together at a table, talking. We had our phones out in front of us, like people always do, just in case someone called or texted us. Tye and his friends were at another table nearby.

  I got up to go to the bathroom. Jen turned away from our table for a minute to talk to someone else. When she turned back, one of Tye’s friends had snuck up to our table. He had her cell phone in his hand.

  “What are you doing with my phone?” Jen asked angrily.

  He looked at her sheepishly, made an excuse, and dropped her phone back onto our table. Then, he hurried back to where Tye and his friends were sitting. I didn’t learn any of this until later, but apparently, Tye and his friends were dying to know if I actually was with Jason or not. They figured that if they found Jason’s number in my phone, they would know we were talking and, therefore, were engaged. So Tye’s friend had volunteered to play detective. Just not very well. Nicely done, MacGyver.

  I’m sure I would have been flattered if I had known about this, but it wouldn’t have really mattered. I was still happily wrapped up in my little wonderland where I was engaged and in love. I do have to admit, though, it was weird seeing Tye that night. Even though I was in a new place in my life, I couldn’t deny that there was something there between the two of us. But I just figured that when you’ve loved someone so much for so long, there will always be a part of you that won’t let go 100 percent. I didn’t think any further about it.

  That night, when Jen was driving us home, Tye kept calling my phone. I kept letting it go to voicemail. Finally, at one point, she got fed up. She snatched my phone from me.

  “Let me answer it,” she said.

  I laughed, thinking, Oh, this should be good!

  “What?” she snapped.

  “Where are you guys going?” he asked.

  “We’re going home, Tye,” she said. “It’s late.”

  And she hung up.

  That was just the start of it. He called back again. This time I answered.

  “Dude, what?” I said. “I just saw you.”

  “I just wanted to say, ‘Be careful on your way home,’” he said.

  The guy was relentless. He really was.

  “We will be,” I said. “Good night.”

  I hung up the phone and turned to Jen, who was looking at me.

  “What?” I asked.

  She just shook her head.

  After that night, Tye continued to pursue me. He would call, text, and email me throughout the day, sometimes just saying hello, and sometimes asking me to go somewhere or do something with him. My typical response was no. I have to admit that it felt really good to be getting this attention from someone I had so desperately wanted it from for so long. But I just didn’t respond to it the way I would have a year earlier. As good as it felt, I had no intentions of going down that road again.

  But once things started really going bad with Jason, and Tye continued to call, I have to admit that I was tempted. I figured that one dinner couldn’t hurt. And then, once I had decided to go out with him, I started to look forward to it. I had some things to get off my chest (again!).

  One of the many times Tye called and asked me to go to dinner, I finally accepted. I think he was shocked.

  There was a stipulation, however: “We can go to dinner, but only as friends,” I clarified.

  That’s exactly what we did. Or I did. I was in this other place. I was with somebody else. I had moved on, and even if it was a struggle to keep my relationship with Jason going at that point, I certainly wasn’t interested in restarting a relationship with Tye again. It literally felt like he was just my friend, nothing more. We talked like buddies over dinner.

  “What’s been going on?” I said. “How’s the agency coming?”

  Not only that, but I actually felt confident enough to ask him about his personal life.

  “Are you dating anybody?” I asked. “Have you seen anybody since, you know, a couple of months ago?”

  We had a nice time, laughed a lot, and caught up some. And then, at the end of dinner, he showed me that he wasn’t quite as ready to just be friends as I was.

  He walked me out to my car just like a gentleman. But when I turned around to hug him good-bye, he had this look on his face.

  Oh gosh, I’ve seen that look! Don’t do it, Tye. Don’t do it!

  But he did. He leaned down and tried to kiss me. I turned my head and backed away from him.

  “Don’t,” I whispered.

  “Why not?” Tye asked. He was not used to being rejected.

  “Because, Tye!” I said. “We’ve been down this path before, and it doesn’t work.”

  He had made this awkward now. I turned, got in my car, and drove away.

  On my way home, I called Jason. I told him I’d had dinner with a friend, which in my mind was the absolute truth, because Tye was nothing more than a friend to me at that point. We talked the entire way home, just doing the typical couple thing of checking in about how each of our days had been.

  Literally, every two minutes, Tye kept calling in. Every time I saw his name come up on my phone, I wondered why he wouldn’t stop, especially after the way we’d just left things.

  When I got home, I was still talking to Jason. We talked for maybe two hours. When we hung up, I finally called Tye back.

  “What’s the deal?” I demanded.

  “Well, why didn’t you pick up when I called?” he said. “Where were you?”

  “Tye, what are you talking about?” I said. “I was busy. Why would I have picked up your phone call? I just saw you.”

  “Were you talking to somebody else?” he said.

  Are you kidding me?

  “Tye, I’m not going to talk to you about this,” I said.

  I think it finally clicked in his mind. I didn’t have to tell him I was involved with someone else. At this point, he had figured it out. And it had to have stung. I don’t think he thought I would really move on. Heck, I hadn’t thought I would ever really move on.

  But as satisfying as it felt to know that Tye was aware that I had moved on, after everything he had put me through, I was still emotionally conflicted. I had been so happy with Tye and then had gotten my heart broken. And then I had been so happy with Jason, but things just felt odd between us. Why did it seem like, every time I truly felt happy, history seemed to repeat itself and leave me in the lurch once again?

  nine

  •

  “STRICKTLY” PLATONIC

  Having to internalize everything that I was going through was near impossible. I wasn’t any more captivated by my job than I had previously been, and so
I had nothing to distract me from thinking about my romantic problems, constantly, at work during the day. I thought about them at night, too, because I didn’t have the Cowboys to distract me anymore. And, yes, I thought about them in the mornings. And on weekends. In fact, there wasn’t a time when I was not thinking about them.

  At least, for once, I hadn’t been afraid to tell Tye what I needed from him, which was for him to leave me alone. Not that it was easy to do so. It took a lot. But it also felt good. I could tell, even then, that it was a very defining time for me, and that I was gaining a lot of independence. I felt like I was in control for once. I was grabbing ahold of the reigns and actually thinking about what I wanted to do with my life.

  On the one hand, if I stuck with the decision I had made, I’d be in Seattle. I’d be a stepmom, which would mean getting a start on the family that was so important to me. I’d be with a man who had made me feel beautiful and intelligent and funny, and who had given me the confidence to get back on my feet after the worst period of my entire life, and who had—up until now—made me feel so special. But my husband would potentially be somebody who really wanted the spotlight.

  On the other hand, if I took this other road, and I went with Tye, I’d be going with the guy who had always made me happier, always made me laugh more, and who still always gave me that same old feeling of “It’s Tye, it’s always been Tye.” But, even more important, I was afraid that I couldn’t trust him. If I did, I knew there was a chance that I could end up exactly where I had been a few months before. Because, as dense as I had been about Tye, and as much as I had lived in denial about the way he treated me, once I went on The Bachelor, I finally got clear on the message Tye had been trying to give me for months before: He didn’t want me. He had ignored me, disrespected me, done whatever he wanted, even when it made me cry (even though I had never let him know he made me cry). So now it was hard to believe that he thought a few text messages were enough to show that his feelings and intentions had changed, just like that.

  It was an internal battle. And because it was occupying so much of my thoughts, I often didn’t want to talk to anybody. I didn’t want to talk to Tye and have him try to win me over. I didn’t want to talk to Jason and have him not try to win me over, or not even do or say the smallest thing to make me feel closer to him and believe our future together.

  I think the worst part was that I couldn’t really talk to anybody about what was going on, and so I had to stuff so much down deep inside. Almost nobody knew I was engaged. My parents knew, but I was not about to tell them about the turmoil that was going on in my life. Tye knew something was up, but I certainly wasn’t at a point where I was talking to him about any of this stuff. Nobody knew what Jason and I were going through, or that it seemed increasingly likely that we would break up. Nobody knew that Tye was trying to come back into my life.

  It was all on me to figure everything out on my own. And I don’t know if a person can do that rationally. Having nobody to talk to made me suddenly realize how much we all need a friend to be a sounding board, just to sit there so we can say, “I have got to tell you what is going on in my life right now.”

  And so the friend can say, “Listen, you’ve got these heart goggles on, and this is clearly a really bad decision.”

  Or

  “I know he’s pulling back, but you need to stick with it.”

  Or

  “Give Tye another chance.”

  I had none of that.

  Then, on January 3, 2009, Tye called me while I was heading to my friend Robin’s house for dinner. I didn’t always answer when he called, but for some reason, this time I picked up.

  After making our usual small talk, Tye dropped an emotional bomb on me.

  “Melissa, I know I can’t give you an explanation as to why now,” he said. “I don’t know. I just know that I have never been surer of anything in my life than I am that I want to be with you. I do love you. And I know, as dumb as this sounds right now, I know that I’m going to marry you.”

  Instead of making me giddy with happiness like it would have done the year before, I didn’t want to hear it. As far as I was concerned, it was too little, too late. I was still convinced that he wanted me only because I had told him that he couldn’t have me, and that he wanted me even more now that he knew he really couldn’t have me.

  “Tye, I can’t do this,” I said. “Listen, I need you to be my friend right now. And if you can’t talk to me like a friend and treat me like a friend, then you need to stop calling me. You need to leave me alone.”

  “Tell me there’s a glimmer of hope that we might get back together, and I’m going to stay,” Tye said. “But if you tell me to move on, I’m going to move on.”

  I sat there for what felt like a long time.

  Just say it. Say it!

  I thought about it, and then shrugged my shoulders.

  “You need to move on,” I said. “You need to go and move on with your life, because we are never going to be together.”

  He didn’t say anything at first. Maybe he was shocked. Maybe he felt weird about being rejected. I don’t know. But then, he just started shouting.

  “No, no I don’t!” He was literally screaming into the phone. “We were meant to be together, and I know that!”

  It was strange hearing him like this. Tye was always so put together, calm, and rational. And this kind of behavior was something I had never seen from him.

  “Tye, you asked me to tell you something, and I told it to you,” I said. “It’s just not what you wanted to hear.” I felt bad, I really did. But what could I do?

  “Tye, I really can’t do this right now, okay?” I said.

  And with that, I hung up.

  What the heck had just happened? I couldn’t believe he’d just said that to me!

  What I didn’t know until later was that ever since I had gotten back to Dallas from The Bachelor, Tye had prayed, and prayed, and prayed about our relationship, and when he woke up that morning (he’s always remembered that it was January 3, which is the only reason I know that date!), it had come to him that he would marry me someday. He could never tell me why or how he knew. He just did.

  What I also learned later was that he called his sister that night. Tye and his sister were very close, so he was going to her for advice. He told her that he was going to go to my apartment, flowers in hand, and tell me exactly how he felt about me, and that he was going to fight to get me back.

  She gave him some pretty good advice. “Don’t get in the way of her relationship,” his sister said. “She’s happy now. She’s in a good place. Unless you are prepared to say you love her and want to marry her, and actually mean it, then leave her alone and let her move on.”

  That night, Tye actually did show up at my apartment with a bouquet of flowers. So much for listening to sisterly advice!

  Only, I wasn’t home, I was out to dinner with my friend Robin. When he realized that I wasn’t at home, he called me.

  “Please come home,” he said. “I’m at your door.”

  This was a whole new side of Tye that I had never seen before. And it would have been sweet. Except! He had only been to my apartment once before, in the year and a half that we had dated, and only then because I had really needed him to help me move my belongings in. And so, again, this was too little, too late.

  “Tye, I’m out to dinner,” I said. “I’m not going to be home for a while. Leave my house.”

  “No,” he said. “I need to talk to you.” Oh my gosh, he was stubborn!

  “Listen,” I said. “If you leave my house right now, I will stop by later, and I will give you five minutes to say whatever you need to say. Five minutes.”

  I didn’t feel like I owed him anything more than that at this point. I had said everything I needed to say, and I continued to be convinced that he just wanted me back because he had missed me while I was gone, and now that I was back, he couldn’t have me. And he had probably gotten flack from all of h
is friends about the fact that he had lost me to The Bachelor.

  When I got over to Tye’s house that night, his roommate was home, and so we went out to the garage and sat in his car, just to have some privacy. He wanted to talk. I sat there staring at him and wondering what he could possibly have left to say.

  Even when he first started talking, it wasn’t immediately clear what he was trying to tell me. Everything he said came out wrong.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t like you a whole lot before,” he said.

  I just looked at him. Way to make a girl feel special, Tye.

  “No, that’s not what I meant,” he said.

  He was nervous.

  “You were always the one, but you weren’t the only one,” he said.

  “What?” I looked at him in disbelief. Wow, you really are bad at this!

  “No, wait!” he said. “That’s not what I meant.”

  He got quiet for a long moment, like he was gathering his strength.

  “Melissa, you cannot tell me that you have more fun with this guy than with me,” he said. “Or that you love him more than you love me.”

  He looked so sweet and serious. And this wasn’t just some guy. This was Tye. He was telling me everything that I had always wanted to hear from him. I wanted to believe him, but he had hurt me so badly. I couldn’t help myself: I started to cry. Too many emotions were running through me. I’d finally hit emotional overload.

  “Maybe,” I said. “But he doesn’t make me cry like you did. And I know he won’t hurt me like you did.”

  Tye lost it at that point. He was crying harder than I was. I just looked at him.

  “You sit here and say that you want me, you want me, you want me,” I said. “Why didn’t you want me four months ago? What happened between now and then?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t tell you what happened.”